Douglas Dillon Book Award
The Douglas Dillon Book Award
for Books of Distinction on the Practice of American Diplomacy
Since 1995, the American Academy of Diplomacy has celebrated distinguished writing about US diplomatic efforts and achievements with an annual award.
A committee of Academy members review nominated books and determine the winner, with concurrence by the Academy’s Board of Directors. The award for the winning entry in 2024 includes a cash prize of $5,000. The awards are customarily presented at the Academy’s Annual Awards Luncheon ceremony in the Benjamin Franklin Room at the US Department of State in the late fall/early winter.
The deadline for submission of nominations for this year’s award was July 15, 2024.
Recipient - 2024
Diplomats at War: Friendship and Betrayal on the Brink of the Vietnam Conflict
by Charles Trueheart
Published by University of Virginia Press
Charles Trueheart has written essays and book reviews for The Atlantic Monthly and The American Scholar, among other publications. His pieces for the Atlantic include cover stories on the American megachurch movement and the war crimes tribunals in the Hague, and for the Scholar, retrospective essays on Lawrence Durrell and Jacques Derrida.
Diplomats at War is a personal memoir by former Washington Post reporter Charles Trueheart—Bill’s son and Nolting’s godson—who grew up amid the events that traumatized two families and an entire nation. The book embeds the reader at the US embassy and dissects the fateful rift between Nolting and Trueheart over their divergent assessments of the South Vietnamese regime under Ngo Dinh Diem, who would ultimately be assassinated in a coup backed by the United States. Charles Trueheart retells the story of the United States’ headlong plunge into war from an entirely new vantage point—that of a son piecing together how his father and godfather participated in, and were deeply damaged by, this historic flashpoint. Their critical rupture, which also destroyed their close friendship, served as a dramatic preface to the United States’ disastrous involvement in the Vietnam conflict.
